Writing Engaging Content

that Your Audience Will Read!

A social media content calendar is a strategy for deciding on what content will be posted on social media for a period of time. This strategy is a good example of conducting smart business. You have the best chance of success by using this strategy with automation in mind. By creating a social media content calendar, you can work smarter and not harder for your business or brand. Luckily, this isn’t a difficult task and, in this article, I’m going to show you how to get started today.

Creating a Social Media Content Calendar Step 1: Dedicate One Day

In order to effective creating an efficient content calendar for your social media strategy, you should at least reserve a full or a partial day for this task. The idea is to take a day to plan and schedule content. This might take all day or if you’re quick enough, it could take less time. This really depends on your abilities. But you want to take some time to conduct the right research, create quality content, and double check everything before you let automation take over. I suggest making a specific day of the week the dedicated for this task and from then on out – stay organized!

Creating a Social Media Content Calendar Step 2: Use Automation

I’ve discussed using automation when creating a social media content calendar. This means that you should use a tool to post on your behalf where at all possible. If the social media site you use has one built in, I would use it before a third-party app. Most of the time, they’re free and offer the same features as the app that isn’t free. However, some social media sites (like Twitter) don’t have very good mobile scheduling features. I personally use Buffer (not sponsored) for managing my Twitter content calendar. The idea is to schedule posts ahead of time to be posted while I focus on engagement. This makes marketing life so much easier.

Creating a Social Media Content Calendar Step 3: Research Themes

Be sure you are researching themes and trends associated with your niche when creating a content calendar and scheduling posts. Check themes associated with specific days, weeks, and months. Check the latest trends with your type of content posted on competing social media channels. For example, I have a brand that focuses on the hiking-niche. I use trends for common nature-themed days such as Wildlife Wednesday and Nation Trail Week for weekly themes. Engaging in these themes can really help get attention to your business or brand. This is why researching themes is definitely one of my suggestions when creating your calendar.

Creating a Social Media Content Calendar Step 4: Two Week Calendars

Some people suggest creating a social media content calendar a month or more. I don’t recommend this. The reason is because stuff changes too quickly. I feel like we can get too complacent if we schedule content that far ahead. I feel like after a while, it becomes too overwhelming to manage that much scheduled content especially if you’re new to the strategy. Instead, I recommend creating the calendar and scheduling for 2-weeks at a time. Two weeks will give you plenty of time to focus on other things while also keeping a good firm track of your calendar.

Creating a Social Media Content Calendar Step 5: Continuous Improvement

Make sure you evaluate your content calendar and strategy of scheduling content on social media pages. Are you doing it too much? Are you not doing it enough? Should you focus on certain days and times? You should always be looking to continuously improve any strategy you adopt for your business or brand. This is another reason why I suggested to 2-week calendar step above – it allows you to measure your activity a littler easier and quicker without being too quick about it.

And there you have it – a 5-step method on starting your own Social Media Content Calendar. You might be nervous about taking this step. But I have to tell you, it makes marketing so much easier. Most marketing services are also using these features otherwise they wouldn’t be able to manage so many client accounts. Learn from the pros if you want to do it yourself. Thanks for reading my article and be sure to share it with someone who might also find it helpful.

If you could add a 6^th step to this article, what would it be? Have you found by having a content calendar, it has made your life easier as a business or brand owner? If you’ve yet to create one, what is stopping you?